From Richard Flynn:

If ever an album cover said 1968 release, this is definitely one of them!
The band consisted of Steve Soles, Eric Kaz & Artie Traum. The album is primarily psych pop rock, but very good tunes, and some great musicianship.

The typeface chosen for the cover typography is West Italiano, which was released by Photo-Lettering by 1967. Photography by Joel Brodsky who’s best known for his portraits of Jim Morrison.

Bear was a psych rock band from Boston, originally called Children of Paradise. They recorded the theme music for Greetings, an early Brian De Palma film about young men avoiding the Vietnam War draft, starring Robert De Niro in his first role.

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The art on the back cover is by Michael Soles.

The Art of the Spanish Guitar is an album by Julian Bream, released in 1970 on the RCA Red Seal label. It contains interpretations of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Britten and others.

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West Italiano, slightly backslanted, for the 1972 paperback edition of The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology (Bantam Y7411). The seminal book by ecologist Barry Commoner (1917–1912) was first published by Knopf in 1971.

The title of this 1968 album by Brenda Lee is written in West Italiano. Her name is set in Murray Hill Expanded 10, while the song list underneath is set using Venus Condensed

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West Italiano in early use for a 1967 album by The Impressions. At this time, the group from Chicago had three members: Curtis Mayfield (lead tenor, guitar, and songwriter of all the album’s songs but one), Fred Cash (baritone/second tenor), and Sam Gooden (bass). The album was arranged and conducted by producer Johny Pate (b. 1923).

The Fabulous Impressions was released with ABC Records. A year later, in 1968, Mayfield (together with Eddie Thomas) formed his own label, Curtom Records, allowing him to retain the rights to and control the publication of his music. In a 2015 article for BOAA, Tim Anderson highlights the economic and political significance and quotes Craig Werner who points out that the emancipation of the Black artists also affected the albums covers:

While the ABC-Paramount releases provide examples of Mayfield’s band dressed in tuxedos and suits, the Curtom releases have The Impressions in much more modern threads.

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This album features many theme songs by various artists. The title, along with “Enchanted Music Series”, is set in West Italiano with some swashes being modified. The song list below is set in ITC Caslon No. 223, with Palatino for “The Young and The Restless”.

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West Italiano, stacked and interlocked and with condensed proportions, on the cover of Eric Chou’s Book of Chinese Love and Sex, published by Bantam Books in 1972. The blurb with the quote from Playboy Book Club is added in Caledonia Italic.

Shades of Today is an album with big-band jazz music by American composer and arranger Pat Williams (1939–2018), released in 1968 on Verve Records. The cover was designed by Jack Anesh with photography by Timothy Galfas, making early use of West Italiano for the display typography.

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Cover for the debut album by Donna Fargo (b. 1945), released by Dot Records in 1972. The Happiest Girl in The Whole U.S.A. opens up with the song of the same name. Recorded by the Californian English teacher during a school break, it became a number one hit on the country charts, and reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. The album also contains her follow-up single “Funny Face”, which became an even bigger hit.

The swashy italic is West Italiano. Originally drawn by Dave West in the late 1960s, it was added to the library of Photo-Lettering, Inc. (PLINC) sometime before 1971. In 2015, Steve Ross and Ken Barber digitized the face for (the now defunct) photolettering.com. Today it’s available from House Industries as Plinc Italiano, who describe it as a “silky semi-serif [that] combines ingredients from eighteenth-century engraved italics and nineteenth-century Italian Modern, softened by fine stroke endings and plump dolloped terminals.”

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Detail: the lowercase letters of “Fargo” were aligned to the cap line, in order to allow tighter linespacing. The setting features several of Italiano’s swash caps. The song names were added in all-caps Helvetica Italic.